Top 5 Cryptocurrencies Set For Success In 2018

2017 was the year of the bull for cryptocurrencies, experiencing a market growth from 17M to 580M at the time of writing, based on coinmarketcap.com. With this growth, we have seen some impressive projects surface, introducing new ways for value and information exchange with the use of cryptography. However, due to the overwhelming information and countless cryptos to choose from, we decided to create a list of promising cryptocurrencies based on upcoming roadmaps, adoption possibilities, foundations set in 2017, and practicality in use-cases. With 2018 right around the corner, here are some projects we project to do extremely well in the upcoming year.

Request Network

Often referred to as the PayPal 2.0, Request is a decentralized network that allows anyone to request a payment (a Request Invoice) for which the recipient can pay in a secure way. All of the information is stored in a decentralized authentic ledger. This results in cheaper, easier, and more secure payments, and it allows for a wide range of automation possibilities. The Request team has also gained a lot of credibility due to their previous experiences (created Moneytis, a money transfer company), backing by Y Combinator (one of the largest accelerators in Silicon Valley, backed companies like AirBnB, Coinbase, Dropbox, etc.)

OmiseGO

OmiseGO is set out for success due to extensive industry connections and strong demand for what they aim to accomplish. The parent company, Omise, has a team of over 130 staff members across multiple countries, while the project is endorsed by notorious names like Vitalik Buterin and Gavin Wood to name a few, both of whom serve as advisors for the team.

IOTA

IOTA is an open-source distributed ledger protocol launched in 2015 that goes ‘beyond blockchain’ through its core invention of the blockless ‘Tangle’. The IOTA Tangle is a quantum-resistant Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), whose digital currency ‘iota’ has a fixed money supply with zero inflationary cost. The goal of IOTA is to improve the issues of blockchain solutions through a transaction validation network that is not subject to PoW/PoI/PoS, while removing scalability issues by actually getting faster as more people use it, not the other way around seen with coins like BTC and ETH. You also don’t have to subsidize miners, so there are no fees on transactions.

NEO

NEO claims to have learned from Ethereum’s mistakes and implemented various technical differences to be positioned as the world’s premier smart contracts platform. One differentiating factor is the variance of programming languages supported, while Ethereum relies on its own developed language that developers must learn before contributions. Moreover, NEO has built its own consensus mechanism called dBFT, which is a lot faster and already allows staking and voting in order to involve people taking part in the consensus process. Additionally, with NEO, you don’t have to pay your share in the network to get access to services, because there is a “dividend” that NEO generates, called GAS. GAS is used for all system fees, as they believe a transaction coin should be de-coupled from a share coin (similarly as you don’t pay for a MacBook in Apple shares).

Waltonchain

Waltonchain is a unique project aimed at creating a complete ecosystem of RFID Chips, readers, and mother+childchains. The benefit of such system is to achieve full automation and transparency in value and information exchange through bridging the physical and virtual ecosystems, creating a world based on the improved Internet of Things, referred to as the VIoT.